On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 08:45:10PM -0700, Dom Leon wrote something like this:
>
> There are only a few places one needs to look within
> Win32 to get it working. There are tons of commands,
> programs, utils and worse yet configuration files
> within Linux to get it working. Im sure most of this
> is because Microsoft tries to hide much of this, but
> nonetheless simply knowing the IRQ settings for the
> sound or NIC card will not get you close to a nice
> Linuc installation.
I disagree somewhat. In the last 18-20 months I've installed RedHat,
Suse, Progeny and Debian (Potato and Woody) and my experience is that
the hardware has been recognized and configured correctly on install.
Depending on what tools you choose to use and how much of an effort
you are willing to make linux can almost be as easy to setup as
WinSomething. I've heard Mandrake is a breeze for even a complete
computer novice.
While I wouldn't place Debian in the "just pop the cd in and go"
category I haven't found anything that should keep the average
computer user from trying it.
You're absolutely correct about having to think in "Debian mode" or
"*nix mode" there is a difference between the way Win systems run
and nix systems work...and yes learning to configure everything
can take a while and getting it to run just as you like it to may take
a while, but in Debian, debconf set up exim and my net stuff when it
was installed and fetchmaiconf is easy to use and if you want
something easier just use Mozilla mail. Debian had me up in going
in a very short time...of course I'm still tweaking and learning, but
that's the fun and the beauty if it.
I'll admit I'm biased because I still have a small WinME
partition that freezes up every time I try to shut it down (about 3
times a year) because it can't deal with a Matrox G400 video card...
and when I check the MS help site all it says about this particular
error is "we have no solution for it"...go figure
My advice for anyone wanting to give Debian a try is "DO IT". It's not as
hard as some will lead you to believe
YMMV
--
Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
- Philip K. Dick
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Harold Bibik hwbj@twcny.rr.com
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